'We owe you a debt. Don't fear it will be forgotten. Perdikkas.' His face smoothed with relief, the young man came forward. 'I left Oxhead in the road outside. Will you see him safe for me? Take a guard of four.'

'Yes, Alexander.' He went off in a blaze of gratitude.

There was a felt silence; Antipatros was looking oddly under his brows.

'Alexander. The Queen your mother is in the theatre. Had she not better have a guard?'

Alexander walked past him, and looked in through the parodos. He stood there in perfect stillness. There was a stir about the entry; the soldiers had found the tragic bier, ornately painted and draped with black.

They set it down by Philip's body and heaved him on to it. The cloak fell from the face; the officer pulled down the eyelids and pressed them till they closed.

Alexander, motionless, stared on into the theatre. The crowd had gone, thinking it no place to loiter in.

The gods remained. In some surge of tumult, Aphrodite had been toppled from her base, and lay awkward and stiff beside it. Flung clear in her fall, young Eros leaned on her fallen throne. King Philip's image sat stockily in its place, its painted eyes fixed on the empty tiers.

Alexander turned away. His colour had changed, but his voice was even. 'Yes; I see she is still there.'

'She must be in distress,' said Antipatros. He spoke without expression.

Alexander gazed at him thoughtfully. Presently, as if something had just chanced to catch his eye, he looked aside.

'You are right, Antipatros. She should be in the safest hands. So I shall be grateful if you, yourself, will escort her up to the citadel. Take what men you think sufficient.'

Antipatros' mouth opened. Alexander waited, his head tilted slightly, his eyes unwavering. Antipatros said, 'If you wish, Alexander,' and went upon his errand.

There was a moment's lull. From his place in the crowd, Hephaistion came out a little, signalling no message, only offering his presence, as his omens prompted him. No message was returned; yet between one step and the next, he saw God thanked for him. His own destiny, too, was opening out before him, in unmeasured vistas of sun and smoke. He would not look back wherever it should take him; his heart accepted it with all its freight, the bright and the dark.

The officer of the bearer party gave an order. King Philip on his gilded bier jogged round the corner.

From the sacred vineyard, borne on a hurdle and covered with his torn cloak, his blood dripping through the plaited withies, some troopers brought Pausanias. He too would have to be shown before the people.

Alexander said, 'Prepare a cross.'

The noises had died to a restless hum, mingled with the roar of the Aigai falls. Lifting above it his strong unearthly cry, a golden eagle swooped over. In its talons was a lashing snake, snatched from the rocks.

Each head lunged for the other, seeking in vain the mortal stroke. Alexander, his ear caught by the sound, gazed up intently, to see the outcome of the fight. But, still in combat, the two antagonists spired up into the cloudless sky, above the peaks of the mountains; became a speck in the dazzle, and were lost to sight.

'All is done here,' he said, and gave orders to march up to the citadel.

As they reached the ramparts which overlooked the Pella plain, the new summer sun stretched out its glittering pathway across the eastern sea.

Author's Note.

All records of Alexander by his own contemporaries have perished. We depend on histories compiled three or four centuries later from this lost material, which sometimes give references, sometimes not.

Arrian's main source was the Ptolemy of this story, but Arrian's work opens only at Alexander's accession. Curtius' early chapters have disappeared; Diodoros, who covers the right time and tells us much of Philip, says little of Alexander before his reign begins. For these first two decades, nearly two thirds of his life, the only extant source is Plutarch, with a few retrospective allusions in the other histories.

Plutarch does not cite Ptolemy for this section of the Life; he would have been a first-hand witness, so he probably did not cover it.

Plutarch's account has here been set against its historical background. I have used, with due scepticism, the speeches of Demosthenes and Aischines. Some anecdotes of Philip and Alexander have been taken from Plutarch's Sayings of Kings and Commanders; a few from Athenaeus.

I have inferred the age at which Alexander entertained the Persian envoys from their recorded surprise that his questions were not childish. On the character of Leonidas, and his searching the boy's boxes for his mother's home comforts, Plutarch quotes Alexander himself verbatim. Of the other teachers, who are described as numerous, only Lysimachos ('Phoinix') is mentioned by name. Plutarch seems not to think much of him. Alexander's estimate appeared later. During the great siege of Tyre, he went for a long hill-walk; Lysimachos, boasting that he was as good as Achilles' Phoinix and no older, insisted on going too. 'When Lysimachos grew faint and weary, though evening was coming on and the enemy were near at hand, Alexander refused to leave him; and encouraging and helping him along with a few companions, unexpectedly found himself cut off from the main body and obliged to spend the night in a wild spot in darkness and extreme cold.' Singlehanded, he raided an enemy watch-fire to snatch a burning brand; the enemy, thinking his troops were at hand, retreated; and Lysimachos had a fire to sleep by.

Leonidas, left behind in Macedon, got only a load of expensive incense, with an ironic gift-tag saying that from now on he need not be stingy towards the gods.

Philip's telling Alexander he should be ashamed to sing so well presumably in public, since it was recorded is from Plutarch, who says the boy never played again. The tribal skirmish after is invented; we do not know where or when Alexander first tasted war. It can only be back-dated from his regency.

At sixteen, he was trusted by the first general in Greece with a command of vital strategic importance, in the full expectation that experienced troops would follow him. By then they must have known him well.

The encounter with Demosthenes at Pella is all invention. It is true, however, that the orator, who as last speaker had had some hours in which to compose himself, broke down after a few stumbling sentences, and though encouraged by Philip was unable to go on. With eight witnesses to his story, Aischines can here be trusted; whether he was to blame they were already old enemies cannot be known.

Demosthenes never liked to speak extempore, but no reason appears for his needing to. He came back with a virulent dislike of Alexander, remarkable towards so young a boy, and seems to have sneered at Aischines for sycophancy to him.

The taming of Boukephalas is given by Plutarch in such detail that one is tempted to guess the source may have been a favourite after-dinner story of Alexander's. My only addition is to suppose the horse had lately been ill-treated. By Arrian's dating it was already twelve years old; it is not conceivable that a mount with a long record of vice would be offered to the King. Greek war-horses were elaborately trained, and this must have been done already. But I cannot credit the astronomical asking price of thirteen talents. Chargers were too expendable (though Alexander cherished Boukephalas to an age of thirty). Philip may well have paid this huge sum for his victorious Olympic racer, and the stories become conflated.

Aristotle's years of fame in Athens began only after Philip's death; those of his works which have been preserved are of later date. We do not know what, exactly, he taught Alexander, but Plutarch speaks of his lifelong interest in natural science (while in Asia he kept Aristotle supplied with specimens) and in medicine. I have assumed Aristotle's views on ethics to be already formed. Among lost works of his was a book of letters to Hephaistion, whose special status he must, it seems, have recognized.

Alexander's rescue of his father from the mutineers is from Curtius, who says Alexander complained bitterly that Philip never admitted to the debt, though he had had to take refuge in shamming dead.

Diodoros, and other writers, describe Philip's victory komos after the battle of Chaironeia; but none of the accounts mentions Alexander's presence.

The sexual mores of Alexander have been much discussed, his detractors tending to claim he was homosexual, his admirers to rebut it with indignation. Neither side has much considered how far Alexander himself would have thought it a dishonour. In a society which accepted bisexuality as a norm, his three state marriages qualified him for normality. His general restraint was much noticed; but, for contemporaries, his most striking peculiarity was his refusal to exploit defenceless victims like captive women and slave-boys, a practice then universal.

His emotional commitment to Hephaistion is among the most certain facts of his life. He displayed an open pride in it. At Troy, in the presence of his army, they honoured together the tombs of Achilles and Patroklos. Though Homer does not say the heroes were more than friends, it was widely believed in Alexander's day; had he thought the imputation disgraceful, he would not so have courted it. After his victory at Issus, when the captive women of Darius' family were bewailing their lord for dead, Alexander went to their tent to reassure them, taking Hephaistion along. According to Curtius, they walked in together, dressed much alike; Hephaistion was taller and by Persian standards more impressive; the Queen Mother prostrated herself before him. Warned of her error by the frantic signals of her attendants, she turned in distressed confusion to the real King, who said to her, 'You weren't far out, Mother; he is Alexander, too.'.

It is clear they behaved with seemliness in public (though high-ranking officials resented Hephaistion's being seen to read, without rebuke, Olympias' letters over Alexander's shoulder). No physical relationship is proved, and those whom the thought disturbs are free to reject it. It is a recorded saying of Alexander's that sleep and sex put him in mind of his mortality.

Alexander survived his friend by about three months, for two of which he was travelling with the body from Ecbatana to Babylon, the intended capital of his empire. The wild extravagance of the funeral rites, the vast grandiose pyre, the request to Zeus Ammon's oracle to grant the dead man the divine status already accorded to Alexander himself (Ammon allowed Hephaistion only to be a hero), suggest that at this time Alexander was barely in command of his reason. Not long after, he contracted fever, but sat up all night at a party. Though he pushed on with his campaign plans as long as he could stand, indeed much longer, he is not recorded to have had a doctor. (He had hanged Hephaistion's, for neglect.) His stubborn mistreatment of/his own condition seems self-destructive, whether consciously or not.

His experience at the Aigai Dionysia is invented, but expresses, I think, a psychological truth. Olympias committed many murders; her eventual execution was entrusted by Kassandros to the relatives of her victims. She killed Eurydike and her infant the moment Alexander's back was turned after Philip's death.

Her complicity in the latter has been much suspected, but never proved. The prophetic 'vision' of Demosthenes is historical.

The general reader who wants to follow Alexander's career as King will find it in Plutarch's Lives (Volume II in the Everyman Edition), or in Arrian's History (Penguin Classics). Both are available in English interleaved with Greek, in the Loeb Classical Library.

Proper Names.

Alexander's real name was, of course, Alexandros; it was so common in North Greece that three other bearers of it appear within this tale alone. Because of this, and because of two-thousand-year-long associations, I have given him the traditional Latinized form.

I have kept traditional forms, too, for some other very familiar names: Philip for Philippos, Ptolemy for Ptolemaios, Aristotle for Aristoteles; and for a number of place names. The word Bucephalus, however, comes trailing such clouds of nineteenth-century cliche that I have preferred to translate it: Boukephalas would be the Doric-Macedonian form. In the story of Alexander, no system of nomenclature is likely to please everyone; so, with apology, I have pleased myself.

I have used the name of Eurydike for Philip's bride, though it was a royal honorific bestowed by him, rather than her given name of Kleopatra, to avoid confusion with Alexander's sister.

Mary Renault was educated at Clifton High School, Bristol and St Hugh's College, Oxford. Having completed her nursing training in 1937, she returned to nursing in 1939 until the end of the war. In 1948 she went to live in South Africa. Her other publications are: Purposes of Love, Kind arc her Answers, The Friendly Young Ladies, Return to Night, North Face, The Charioteer, The Last of the 'Wine, The King Must Die, The Bull from the Sea (Penguin 1973), The Lion in the Gateway (for children), The Mask of Apollo, and The Persian Boy (Penguin 1974). Fire From Heaven received the Silver Pen Award in 1971. Her latest books are The Nature of Alexander and The Praise-Singer. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1959.

The End.